Is the Eat Stop Eat Diet right for me?

We all have fantastically busy lives, and one of the hardest parts of dieting and exercise is finding a way to fit it into our schedules. Some claim to be low impact but still require you to count calories or points, write down what you eat in a journal, blog entries, or being active on a dieters forum. That’s not even taking into consideration the ones that ask you to attend a gym up to 3 times a week. Most of us would have a hard time fitting everything in, even if we were our own bosses and had plenty of time on our hands.

Thanks in part to the Eat Stop Eat Review this added pressure is a thing of the past. It’s a happy fact that this diet really is low impact, on your life, on your schedule, and especially on your wallet. Where a lot of diets ask you to buy expensive foods, or those designated from their own recipes and bought from them directly, this one asks nothing of the sort. This diet is all about changing how you view mealtime and breaking the normalcy of thinking that we need to eat 3-5 meals a day to be healthy.

A common misconception is the idea of “starvation mode” which was brought about in the early 90’s flaunted by fad diets that couldn’t manage to stick around. It claims that your body will eat away at striated muscle mass like heart tissue before it eats away at fat, and that by doing so, you are damaging your body. Research shows that this is not only untrue, but historically proven wrong. Our bodies are made to withstand feast and famine times since our early ancestors, and their need to go sometimes long intervals without sustenance. During these times, our bodies ate away at the fat deposits, and would not begin eating away at heart tissue until more than 5 days had gone by without any food or drink. Further, our bodies entered a state of renewal, using the time when we weren’t needing energy to burn calories to mend our bodies and boost our immune systems. Ages ago, and still today, having a strong immune system means survival.

The idea behind Eat Stop Eat is simple. It introduces the idea of an intermittent fasting diet, the same thing religious groups have been doing for ages. The only requirement of this diet is that you stop eating for a period of time, never longer than about a day and a half to reset the need to be constantly digesting food, which slows down your metabolism, and leaves no time for your body to mend itself. Though one truth does remain the same no matter what diet you choose for yourself. What you eat does matter, and you cannot expect to be on this diet, eat things like pizza, cakes, cookies or anything else you know is bad for you and still expect to be losing weight in a healthy way. You can still enjoy the things you love in smaller portions, and due to the nature of fasting, you won’t be as hungry when you do eat.

Benefits to fasting include, lowered blood sugar levels, lowered fat levels, reduction of high blood pressure, helping people lose weight, prevention and treatment of diabetes, and a lower resting heart rate, which leads to a decreased risk of heart attacks. Among the better of the benefits are a reduction of cholesterol and triglycerides, which reduces the chance of stroke. Though the benefits are many, there have been some side effects reported with this diet, which may also play a key role in deciding if a diet is right for you. People have reported bad breath, irritability, dehydration, and headaches. However, these side effects can be easily fought before they happen, making sure that on fasting days you brush your teeth 3 times a day, knowing that the irritability is just your body becoming accustomed to a new eating schedule, and making sure to drink plenty of water while fasting, which also helps dispel onset headaches. Being that the side effects are very easy to deal with in advance, the benefits far outweigh the potential drawbacks.

Because exercise of any kind is good for our bodies and our metabolism it is encouraged that you are active in any way at all, that suits both your lifestyle and your schedule, as long as you are getting more movement than you normally do each week, that’s enough to help you boost the effects of this diet. It’s suggested that you find ways to exercise at home, using things you probably already own, like soup cans as weights for arm exercises, or old hosiery as elastic bands for resistance training for your legs.

Researching all the many diets that are out, and trying to discover which is best for you personally is a daunting task, but the rewards are many. Our health is the biggest and most important thing we can reward ourselves with. Read more about the Eat Stop Eat diet, and become one of the many that it has helped live a healthy and happy lifestyle.